


Flooding

by The_Last_Kenobi



Series: Whumptober 2020 [11]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Jedi Apprentice Series - Jude Watson & Dave Wolverton, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Author Is Sleep Deprived, Child Neglect, F/M, Gen, Grief, I'm Sorry, Please Be careful, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Attempt, Whump, Whumptober 2020, dark themes, trigger warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:07:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26964166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Last_Kenobi/pseuds/The_Last_Kenobi
Summary: Tahl Uvain dies on Apsolon.Surrounded by friends and familiar faces, Obi-Wan Kenobi drowns alone.Written for Whumptober 2020Day 11 - Crying
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Tahl, Qui-Gon Jinn & Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn/Tahl (Star Wars)
Series: Whumptober 2020 [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1956463
Comments: 22
Kudos: 239





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This one got away from me - really got away. Please don't read if the subject matter will only hurt you. 
> 
> Note: This story will have two chapters, but is meant to be read in two ways. Either stop after the first one for a sadder, more ambiguous ending - or read on to Chapter 2 for a solid, more positive ending. Whatever you prefer.

Obi-Wan had experienced _cold_ before.

In his fifteen years, almost three of them as a Jedi Padawan… he’d endured a lot.

Once, when he was six, he had come down with a virus that left him feverish in the Ward for almost a week. Deep, inescapable chills had wracked him endlessly, making his whole tiny body shudder so hard he was sore when it passed.

When he was twelve, he had been collared and tossed in a deep sea mine, and the unnatural cold and the lack of the Force had left him sick, and hollow.

When he was thirteen, he had spent weeks on a war-torn planet called Melida/Daan, a nightmare, a hellscape where the adults were split into two factions trying to exterminate the other, and a third faction of only children that all the adults were eager to wipe out. As the weather worsened and sickness set in and medical supplies and shelter ran low, Obi-Wan had spent many nights huddled against Cerasi and Nield for warmth, feeling as if he were growing mold. A nauseous sort of cold.

When he was fifteen, Tahl Uvain died with Qui-Gon Jinn holding her hand, and Obi-Wan was plunged into a type of cold he had never experienced or imagined.

It began with the chill in his veins when he felt her begin to slip away, heard the medical droids talking.

The chill became ice when she died.

The ice spread outward from his bones to cover his skin like frost when Bant accused him.

The last of the warmth in the universe was sucked away when Qui-Gon looked directly at his Padawan with baleful, blaming eyes and—

And then there was no warmth to be found anywhere.

Bant wasn’t speaking to him. His other friends were either not around or passing him by with nervous, sympathetic glances. Tahl was dead, and it was his fault—he had fallen, he had injured his leg so badly he couldn’t run, and Qui-Gon had hesitated out of pure obligation—and Tahl had died.

It was _his fault_.

And everyone agreed—including…his Master.

At first Qui-Gon was simply—well, cold. Distant. Aloof, disappointed, biting in his words. At first, Obi-Wan tried to help, to apologize, offer comfort, offer up grief and repentance.

But Qui-Gon grew colder still.

Obi-Wan was cold inside, and outside, and the air was cold, and he couldn’t feel his fingertips anymore, ever. When he touched his face it felt hot, as if he were constantly feverish. He felt like he was wasting away, but when Obi-Wan looked in the mirror—he looked normal, if unusually pale.

His bed was suddenly uncomfortable.

Food slowly lost its taste and appeal.

So, Obi-Wan stopped sleeping, stopped eating.

He kept up with his classes, but as soon as he had completed an assignment and fulfilled a new standard, it all slipped away from him like water between clenched fingers. His katas got sloppier as he felt the numbness move from his fingers to his palms and wrists, and then his toes and feet and knees and elbows. None of his movements felt real.

One day, three months after the nightmare, he returned to the quarters he shared with his Master to find the lights on full luminosity, flooding the apartments with light that seemed—too bright. It hurt his eyes. Edged every line of the scene in blinding, razor-sharp definition.

Qui-Gon was sitting in a chair, gazing sightlessly out the window.

“…Master?” Obi-Wan said. He surprised himself with how steady his voice was.

Slowly, the man turned to stare at his apprentice, and what they had been ignoring suddenly seemed unavoidable and obvious. The gulf between them, wider and wider every day, every moment, and the glimmering shadows in the boy’s eyes and the frigid blame in the man’s.

“Master?” Obi-Wan rasped, less steady now.

“Padawan,” said Qui-Gon.

And the word meant _nothing_. It wasn’t his name, it was barely his title, and it was empty falling from his Master’s lips.

To Obi-Wan, it sounded as if the man simply didn’t want to say Obi-Wan’s _name_.

The cold suddenly felt like...water.

Obi-Wan Kenobi was drowning in a icy lake while standing in warm, overly-bright rooms right under the dead eyes of his beloved Master, and if he didn’t move he was going to collapse—

He turned on his heel and fled, speeding out of their quarters on feet he couldn’t feel, his boots turning awkwardly beneath him. He wrapped his arms around himself and ran, welcoming the semi-darkness of the Temple halls at night, the illusion of being alone and unnoticed, slipping beneath the waves. 

He ran and ran and ran until he found himself in one of the darkened pool rooms, reserved for water exercises and survival training programs—thirty yards long, ten yards wide, twenty feet deep, and utterly calm.

Obi-Wan stopped abruptly at the very edge.

It was very dark in here.

Only a few lanterns along the walls gave the room any illumination at all.

Obi-Wan stared and stared at the undulating, ever-changing patterns the light made in the water, entranced. His tunics hung loosely on his too-thin frame; his brown robes, the same color as Qui-Gon’s, drooped off his shoulders from all the running.

Something fell into the water, disturbing the pattern.

Then another, and another.

Obi-Wan touched his face and found it soaked with tears that he couldn’t feel, dripping steadily from his skin into the pool.

Well, then.

He was already drowning, anyway.

The fifteen-year-old hesitated, feeling as if his brain was moving so sluggishly, but straightforwardly—on some inevitable path that had been coming and coming since Tahl had died, or maybe even before then—maybe since Bandomeer, or even his birth or conception.

Obi-Wan pulled his robes back over his shoulders, straightened them, his nerveless fingers sliding along the edge of the fabric that he hardly ever went without but couldn’t remember the feel of. He ran a hand over his Padawan haircut, stumbling over the tightly bound tail.

And he stepped off the edge and into the depths.

* * *

It didn’t feel any different than it had before.

Drowning.

Real drowning felt just the same as drowning in the cold and the loneliness and the blame, just with more involuntary thrashing.

Obi-Wan gave himself over to it, arching his back into the water, letting physics pull him deeper.

His lips parted eventually and killing water replaced the icy air.

He didn’t much mind.

His heart was pounding erratically, frantically, like a panicked creature cornered and afraid, but Obi-Wan wasn’t afraid. He was just still so terribly cold.

If he could just persist a little longer, the cold would finally go away.

Obi-Wan threw himself into the cold, and allowed himself to hope for something for the first time since Apsolon.


	2. Chapter 2

The light was disrupted.

The pattern of water and lantern-glow was shattered as something erupted through the pool, descending directly towards Obi-Wan where he floated halfway down, halfway drowned.

He couldn’t move and he didn’t want to.

But hands seized him—one grabbed his robes, another wrapped around his midsection, and he was being pulled up and up and up, unable to protest, or call for help, or resist, or do anything at all.

As soon as his head broke the water, everything went dark.

The water had been clear and smooth and familiar.

Air was cold and violent and full of too much light—

Obi-Wan choked and flailed blindly, but the water in his lungs was stronger than the air around him, and he fell back, limp and blind and still drowning.

The hands shifted.

He was pulled forcefully, dropped onto his back, his robes and hair and lungs and soul flooded with cold, cold water. One hand rested on his chest, another against his cheek.

They were warm. Almost painfully so, almost hot.

Obi-Wan was confused. The contrast between the buzzing air, hot hands and the lethargy, water-in-lungs was jarring, bewildering. He didn’t know which one he wanted to win, but he knew that one of them would in the end and that he had no say in which or how.

The hands moved again, and suddenly he felt _pain_.

Pain, where for so long there had been nothing but cold and numb—

The hands were pulsing over his chest, trying to keep his heart moving, trying to get him breathing air instead of the flood. Rhythmic slamming—one of the warm hands gripped his jaw, tilted it back, and then someone was breathing into his mouth, and hot air flooded his throat, but no further—the water in his lungs simply waited, still and unbothered, cold and patient.

The hands slammed again and again.

It hurt.

The waters were disturbed.

More breathing.

More slamming.

He had no control. The air and the waters were at war.

And then, as the life-saving pulsing started once again, there was a voice, too—loud, and real, and desperate, such a difference to before that he almost didn’t recognize it—but he did. He knew that voice.

“ _Obi-Wan!_ ” Qui-Gon screamed. He sounded so panicked, so raw, so unlike himself. “Obi-Wan, please, please, please! You need to breathe, _please_ , Obi-Wan, _breathe!_ ”

Obi-Wan’s heart broke. Because his Master sounded heartbroken, and not in a way the boy understood, not in the way Qui-Gon had been heartbroken over Tahl for the past three months. That had been cold and distance and a steady, agonized drifting, fibers tearing apart and no words to be spoken.

This was wild, anguished, claws digging in.

The waters in his lungs churned.

The hands slammed his chest once more, and Obi-Wan launched off the floor into a sitting position, spewing water all over his already sopping robes, over the damp floors, and over the figure leaning over him with a stark white face and piercing eyes. He was so clear, but not hard-edged like he had been back in their too-bright rooms.

“ _Obi-Wan_ ,” his Master sobbed, pulling him into a fierce hold, dragging his Padawan onto his lap and pressing him close, soothing Obi-Wan’s uncontrollable coughing and shivering with his warmth.

Obi-Wan struggled to shift his arms so that he was holding Qui-Gon too, refusing to just be held like a ragdoll. His hands were slow to respond to his commands, but they did eventually, and he furled his fingers in the back of the Master’s robes and held on with all he had.

“Obi-Wan,” Qui-Gon said again, voice ragged. “ _Obi-Wan_ , what were you thinking? No, Obi-Wan, _no_.”

“I’m sorry,” his Padawan whispered, voice almost gone, the effort it took sharp and painful and wonderful. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I failed—”

Failed at what, though? Keeping up with his Master? Saving Tahl? Being strong? Drowning, in the water that had called him?

All of the above?

Qui-Gon didn’t seem to agree. He kept shaking his head and saying “ _No_ ,” over and over again, and holding Obi-Wan so close, fiercely determined to keep him, to keep him warm, to make sure he was breathing air and not water.

Obi-Wan’s limbs felt heavy as lead. His skin felt clammy and uncomfortable. The robes were icy cold and heavier than his limbs. His forehead and the tips of his fingers and toes felt as if they were on fire, and Qui-Gon’s grip on him was almost bruising. Everything was overwhelming and loud and inescapable.

And Obi-Wan found, as the waters began to dry and comforting arms helped him to his feet, that he preferred the air to the flood.


End file.
